


what it leaves behind

by 26stars



Series: AU August 2020 [8]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Baby Immortal!Elena, Mentions of Deke, Minor Lincoln Campbell/Skye | Daisy Johnson, Multi, Old Guard AU, Team Leader Daisy, The violence warning is for Daisy shooting Elena, but it's not described graphically, immortal au, mentions of Andrew, mentions of Raina
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25783126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: Daisy has been alive for...a while. She's been killed plenty of times, but it hasn't stuck yet.She and her tiny band of immortal do-gooders are fleeing a scene where their secret has been discovered when they all have the same dream and realize that a new immortal has just been "born" (by being killed). Daisy sets off to find her and bring her into the fold before people with worse intentions get there first.The Old Guard AU for AU August day 8: immortal creature AU (can be read without seeing the movie but beware major spoilers within...)
Relationships: Lincoln Campbell & Skye | Daisy Johnson, Vijay Nadeer/Joey Guitierrez, Yo Yo Rodriguez & Skye | Daisy Johnson
Series: AU August 2020 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1860802
Comments: 14
Kudos: 16
Collections: AOS AU August 2020, Women of the MCU





	what it leaves behind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ClementineWhy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClementineWhy/gifts), [Ellsey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellsey/gifts).



> So, my first idea had been to put May at the center of this but then I realized, the Secret Warriors were Right There and so good for this story...
> 
> Because of Having Time, I assume that everyone in the group is multilingual, so all the italicized dialogue should be assumed to be the characters speaking Spanish for the sake of their newest member.
> 
> For Clem and Ellsey--little did you know when you mentioned your crack pairing that this fic was already 99% done :)

They left their blood-soaked, bullet-gored clothes behind, buried in the dusty soil several dozen miles away from the compound where everything had happened. They were able to catch a train—literally catch it, racing up beside it and stowing away in a boxcar—out of South Sudan, headed east. There wasn’t much talking once they got settled, but then again, there wasn’t much to say. Joey and Vijay had lain down curled around each other on one side, Lincoln had sprawled on some sacks of grain against a crate, and Daisy had tucked herself into a corner where she could sit upright and keep watch.

Though she was exhausted from their hike through the desert and the events of the days before, her thoughts raced, keeping her mind awake even though her body begged for rest.

_Shaw knows. The whole thing was recorded, and he saw us stand up after two magazines of bullets in each of us. He may not know what it means, but he knows enough to want to know more._

There were a million possibilities of what someone could do with that kind of information. For the moment, it didn’t really matter _why_ he had set them up. Daisy was most concerned with _who else_ already knew, and how far this information could spread before her team choked out its source.

Miles rolled past and the train rocked her steadily, gradually soothing her through simple physical repetitive motion. Exhaustion won out at last, and the boxcar around her drifted off to darkness…

_Children with brown eyes and dark hair._

_Shouts in Spanish._

_Military police._

_My cousin._

_Gunfire._

_Running._

_A bullet through the neck._

_Crashing to hot pavement._

_Grasping weakly at my throat._

_A cross pendant soaked in blood…_

Daisy gasped awake, all three of her companions doing the same. Shaken and shocked, they looked wildly at one another, all trying to catch their breath.

“What the fuck…” Daisy whispered, rapidly looking in each of their eyes in turn.

She knew _exactly_ what this was. She just literally could not think of a worse time for this to happen.

Lincoln grabbed for his flask. Vijay lunged for his sketchbook.

“It was a woman,” Joey was already saying. “Little. Long hair.”

“I saw a military policeman with the Colombian flag on his uniform,” Vijay said, nodding has his pencil began flying across the paper. He looked up at Lincoln. “What did you see?”

Lincoln was choking down a drink has he answered. “A cross necklace. Some short buildings of brick. And a police car with _Bogotá_ on it.”

“I felt her die,” Joey muttered, rubbing his neck. “Shot in the throat…”

“She must be with the rebel faction in Bogotá,” Daisy finally said. She felt her men looking at her, but she stared at the floor, running her fingers through her short hair. “It’s been almost two hundred years…why now…”

“Everything happens for a reason, boss,” Joey reminded her quietly.

Daisy met his eyes for a moment, then looked away with a tired scoff.

_Still a child…_

“We have to find her,” Vijay announced, his pencil still working across the paper.

“No,” Lincoln said immediately. “We stick to the plan. We find Shaw.”

“So we just leave her out in the open?” Vijay said disbelievingly.

“No, _we’re_ in the open,” Lincoln reminded him. “We’re the ones who are exposed.”

“Not like _her_ , Lincoln,” Joey said quietly. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember what that felt like. Wherever she is, she’s confused, she’s scared, and she’s more alone than she’s ever been in her entire life. We all remember how that felt. She needs us”

Daisy cursed, punching the floor furiously, then lunged to her feet, snatching up her backpack.

“I’ll handle the retrieval.”

“Hey, come on boss,” Lincoln immediately protested, and she whirled on him.

“If we’re dreaming about her, she’s dreaming about us, which makes her a beacon straight to us. We don’t need more loose ends right now.”

He looked down, chastened. It had been his idea to do this mission for Shaw in the first place…

“What do we do in the meantime?” Joey asked.

“Get to France,” Daisy ordered. “Use the Charlie safehouse. I’ll meet you there.” She dialed up her warning glare at Lincoln again. “And you—find Shaw.”

Vijay tore the page out of his notebook and held it up to her. Daisy took it and saw the image of the stranger’s face again, a woman who wouldn’t be a stranger too much longer.

“Jesus. She’s just a baby,” Daisy breathed, taking in the woman’s wide, dark eyes, her full lips, her blood-soaked neck...

Striding to the boxcar door, she heaved it open, letting in the dust and the bright desert sun.

“Be careful, boss,” Joey called after her.

Daisy smirked as she jumped out, crashing and rolling in the rocks and sand.

They never said _Don’t die out there_ , not since they realized that none of them did…

~

Elena woke up in the hospital.

She was alone, which confused her, and she was handcuffed to the bed, which confused her more. Calling out for help brought a twinge to her throat, making her immediately remember what had happened. Groping with one hand and without the aid of a mirror, Elena explored her neck, looking for the wound that should have been there, barely healing…

She found nothing.

No bandage. No stitches. No scab. No scar.

Just the same skin that had always been there.

She briefly glimpsed a face in the window of her hospital room door and renewed her shouts, but still, no one came. Elena looked around, trying to put the pieces together, and eventually guessed that if she was wounded in the confrontation between her little team and the police convoy they were trying to disarm, police would have put her under arrest even if they let an ambulance save her life.

She had a single hairpin still tucked into her braid (her hair felt gritty but she ignored that for the moment), so she pried the pin out and started working on the handcuffs.

The sudden arrival of a nurse made her thrust the pin out of sight beneath the sheet, and Elena submitted to the nurse’s questions while accepting the cup of water offered to her. She already knew to lie though her teeth.

_“Pain level?”_

_“Zero.”_

_“Do you remember what happened to you?”_

_“No.”_

When the nurse left, Elena went back to work with her pin, and after a moment, the cuff on her wrist popped open. Leaving the bed, Elena stole to the door and peered out at a hall of a hospital she didn’t recognize.

_Well, it could have been a jail…_

She was only in a hospital gown, and none of her effects are anywhere in sight, so she would need to be aggressive to get something to wear. She slipped into the adjoining bathroom, waited until she heard the nurse come back, then called for help, saying she’d fallen…

She stepped into the hall a few minutes later in the nurse’s clothes with an ID on her hip, walking straight down the corridor to the stairs and down to the back entrance. At ground level, she made it all the way up the alley to the street, but suddenly a police car veered around the corner, blocking her way.

“ _Morning, miss_ ,” the first officer said, climbing out of the car, his hand already on his gun as he approached her. “ _We need to ask you some questions.”_

Elena was still caught between fight and flight when a dark blur crashed into the policeman, knocking him out against the hood of the car too fast for Elena to follow. The second officer immediately raced at the assailant, but in only seconds, he was down too, and Elena was staring down the barrel of his gun held in the hands of a dark-haired woman she didn’t know.

Didn’t know, but _did_ recognize. A face she’d just seen in her dreams.

“ _What do you want_?” Elena said, raising her hands defensively.

“ _Get in the car_ ,” the woman ordered, jerking her chin at the police cruiser. “ _I’ll explain once we’re safe.”_

Elena moved robotically to the passenger seat and got in, and the woman threw the car into gear as soon as she was behind the wheel.

“ _Who are you_?” Elena asked, staring dumbly at the stranger as she drove.

“ _Wang Juxing_ ,” the woman said, her eyes on the road. “ _But you can call me Daisy.”_

~

Somewhat predictably, Elena put up a fight when Daisy tried to get her onto a smuggler’s cargo plane out of the country, but this was easily resolved by shooting her through the head, carrying her on board before she healed up, and then letting the woman wear herself out trying to take Daisy down with her fists when she woke up mad.

Oh, well. After getting shot up a few days ago, a fistfight was a nice change of pace…

The young woman had settled down by the time the plane got to the point of no return over the Atlantic, and Daisy gave her as much backstory as she felt like telling her before they got to France.

“ _Four people? Do you know the meaning of the word ‘army’_?” Elena scoffed when she saw the three men waiting for her in their church-turned-safehouse outside Paris.

Lincoln gave Daisy a knowing look, and she rolled her eyes, brushing past him towards the bathroom for a shower. “Yep, it was like that the whole way here.”

She left the men to introduce themselves, and once she came out of the back room with clean hair and fresh clothes, Elena was already sitting at their table eating the food that Joey had cooked for all of them. Daisy served herself a plate and sat down too, and Vijay and Joey immediately began asking her for details about the journey she just made. Elena went quiet for a while, eating and watching them interact, but once there was a comfortable silence, she finally spoke up again.

_“So if you’re actually an army, are you good guys or bad guys?”_

The four of them exchanged glances, and Vijay finally answered, leaning back in his chair. _“Depends on the century.”_

 _“We fight for what we think is right,”_ Joey added in explanation. _“Depends on the history book too, I suppose.”_

 _“How are you all in my dreams?”_ Elena asked next. _“I saw all your faces in my mind before I woke up in the hospital…”_

 _“We dream of each other,”_ Lincoln shrugged. _“They stop when we meet.”_

“ _Why_?” Elena pressed.

 _“I believe it’s because we are meant to find each other_ ,” Vijay said, and Daisy saw Joey wink at him.

“ _More like misery loves company_ ,” Lincoln mutters, stabbing another bite of food with his fork.

Elena glanced at Daisy for her opinion, and she shrugged, gesturing to Lincoln. “ _What he said.”_

“ _It used to take us years to find a new immortal once we started dreaming of them_ ,” Joey said, and Daisy got up for another drink, letting him tell the story. “ _Lincoln was the last—we started dreaming of him in 1862, didn’t find him until 1870._ ”

“ _Wait, 1862_?” Elena repeated. “ _So you’re…how old?”_

“ _My ID says I’m thirty-one_ ,” Lincoln said, and Daisy could hear him smirking. “ _But I first died fighting in the American Civil War_. _My real name is Ebenezer. They call me Lincoln because of the era that made me_.”

“ _So… you’re even older than him?”_ Elena said, and Daisy came back to the table to see her looking around at Joey and Vijay. “ _How old are_ you?”

“ _Almost five and a half. Centuries_ ,” Vijay said proudly.

“ _We met in India at the end of the 1400s_ ,” Joey said, smiling at the memory, like he always did. “ _I was part of Vasco da Gama’s crew. Vijay was a royal guard that da Gama kidnapped on his way out of town when the Zamorin didn’t let us stay. I guarded Vijay on the ship until he tried to kill me to escape. And then I woke up and killed him_.”

Vijay smiled. “ _We did that a few times, and it got boring. Then we found a better way to pass the time_.”

Elena had an amazed look in her eyes as she turned to Daisy.

“ _You’re the oldest_ ,” she inferred, and Daisy nodded.

“ _Yeah_.”

“ _How old_ are _you_?”

Daisy didn’t even know the exact number anymore, but she also hated saying her best guess out loud. “ _Old_.”

“How _old_?” Elena pressed.

Daisy took a long sip of her drink before answering. “ _Too old_.”

There was a beat of silence as Elena looked around at all of them again. “ _So…we really never die_?”

“ _Nothing that lives lives forever_ ,” Daisy said quietly.

“ _But you said we were immortal_ ,” Elena insisted. “ _On the plane_ —"

“ _I know what I said_ ,” Daisy cut her off tiredly, “ _and we mostly are, but we_ can _die. One of us did—a long time ago. He was a warrior, like us, but one day his wounds just...stopped healing up_.”

“ _So then… why would you shoot me back there_?” Elena said, touching the back of her head where Daisy had put a bullet when she’d tried to run away. “You could have killed me.”

Daisy sighed, getting to her feet to take her dishes to the sink. “ _That wouldn’t have happened. You’re too new_.”

Elena was silent, staring down at her plate, and Joey stepped in.

“ _You’ve got a lot to process_ ,” he said, touching her shoulder gently. “ _And you’ve still got a lot of blood in your hair. You should get a shower and some sleep. I’ll show you where everything is._ ”

He led her from the room to their makeshift suite in the back, and Daisy turned to Lincoln, switching to English, just in case Elena could still hear.

“She kept saying she wanted to talk to her family. She’s got a cousin who was in the fight with her, parents she’s close to…”

Lincoln was already shaking his head. “That’s not going to help her.”

Daisy gave him a meaningful look. “She might need to hear the _why_ from you.”

Elena eventually fell asleep easily enough on the bed that was Daisy’s, between Joey and Vijay’s bigger one and Lincoln’s army cot that he had always preferred. The men followed suit eventually, and Daisy made herself comfortable in a chair in the main room with a promise to wake Lincoln for second watch later in the night. She sat in front of the darkened TV and replayed the day’s events in her mind, pushed back on the memories of Anidirīwi, the way he’d died, and the way his death had pulled the rug out from under all of them…

She flexed a fist, surprised to realize that her knuckles still ached from her and Elena’s fight on the plane…

Suddenly, Elena sat bolt-upright, gasping raggedly and cutting off a cry. Lincoln, Joey, and Vijay all reacted immediately, half-drawing guns from waistbands and pillows and squirming instinctively towards her…

Daisy remained in her chair, but she looked over, watching closely.

“What happened?” they all murmured in various languages, but Elena seemed to understand their meaning.

“ _It was just a bad dream_ ,” she whispered, still catching her breath. Joey flipped on the light though, sitting up expectantly.

“ _Tell us_.”

Elena didn’t speak for a long moment, but then she found Daisy’s gaze through the darkness and took a deep breath.

“ _I dreamed about a woman locked in an iron coffin_.”

Daisy immediately got to her feet and strode out of the building.

She sat in the dark church cemetery for a long time, well after what would have been long enough for Elena to recount her dream and Vijay and Joey to fill her in on its context. Daisy rubbed her aching hands and counted to a hundred in every language she could remember, and finally, Lincoln came to find her.

“You’d think I’d be able to listen to that story by now…” Daisy muttered through gritted teeth. “It’s been what, five hundred years? Long enough to get over it?”

“You don’t have to get over anything if you don’t want to,” Lincoln said, leaning against the same headstone and slipping his arm around her shoulders. Daisy remained stiff for a moment, then gave in, leaning gently into his embrace.

“At least now she understands why we avoid capture at all costs,” Lincoln said. “All eternity, locked in a cage…”

“She was already getting a taste of that in the hospital before I got there,” Daisy murmured. “The police were going to lock her up.”

“She’ll get on the same page soon enough,” Lincoln assured her, squeezing her shoulders gently. “I’m glad you were able to find her.”

“Why now?” Daisy wondered out loud again. “We’ve never been more than four alive at one time. I didn’t think we’d ever see another…”

“Maybe we need her for a reason we don’t know yet,” Lincoln ventured. “She’s got something important to do.”

“It’s been years and years of the same _shit_ ,” Daisy exhaled, pulling away and pacing towards a headstone that was a few hundred years older than Lincoln but not even a tenth of her own age. “We do some good, we save some lives, and humanity still slides a little closer to the brink with every passing decade. What difference could we possibly be making?”

“That way, madness lies,” Lincoln sighed, not following her. “But what else would we do with ourselves? I may not have been everywhere yet, but you? You could have retired long before you met me. Before you met Joey and Vijay…

“I could have retired after I got burned at the stake,” Daisy muttered, “but we had a burial at sea to track down…”

She cracked the door, let the memory in for just a second, of the last time she saw Raina as the mob led her away in an iron maiden towards the ship that would steal her from Daisy’s life forever…

Daisy had sworn up and down that she would not let that moment be the last time they saw each other. She’d failed.

And then she’d given up, which was just as bad.

Time had stolen plenty of memories from her. Daisy couldn’t remember her family member’s faces anymore. She remembered that she had once had a mother, a father, a sister… but in the thousands of years since, their faces had worn from her memory, like rocks disintegrating beneath waves. The first thousand years of her immortality were a blur now, only a few memories had survived the culling. The memories of the years when it was just her and Raina…those were too painful to remember, but also too precious to forget.

What time stole was not the worst part of immortality. It was what it left behind. What couldn’t be forgotten.

Her last memory of Raina…the death of the last crew-member that might have known where they flung her to an eternal execution…the day Daisy told Joey and Vijay that they had to stop searching, that there was nothing else to be done, that they had to move on…

She didn’t realize she was crying until Lincoln was in front of her again, pulling her into a gentle hug. Daisy buried her face in his chest for a moment while she quickly pulled herself together, until she felt confident that she could stand up straight and act like the team leader she was supposed to be…

When she pulled away though, Lincoln was staring at her curiously.

“Daisy…when did you get hurt?” He held up one hand, and even in the dark, she could see that it was smudged with red. “There’s fresh blood on your shirt.”

**Author's Note:**

> So, in case it wasn't clear, Anidirīwi is supposed to be Andrew--it's the Ethiopian variation of his name. 
> 
> I couldn't really convince myself that anyone in the Civil War era would have been named Lincoln, so I picked a name that he wouldn't dare carry around in the 21st century. 
> 
> And since I saw Daisy coming from Asia I picked a Chinese name for her. Wang for Chloe's family name, Ju is Chinese for Daisy, and Xing is part of my Chinese name.


End file.
